Criminal Trajectories
Further to our lively rumblings on crime and recidivism, including recent comments, Inquisitive Bird has some relevant data:
One illustrative example: people who are imprisoned in the United States have typically been arrested many times. An analysis showed that less than 5% of people admitted to prison had only been arrested the one time that led to the prison sentence… It was more common to have been arrested 30+ times than having only the single arrest that led to imprisonment. The median number of arrests was 9, and more than 3 out of 4 prisoners had been arrested 5+ times.
Another example is that nearly a third of shoplifting arrests in 2022 involved just 327 people, who collectively were arrested and rearrested more than 6,000 times.
But the reality is even worse than this, for criminals (when asked) admit that have often committed dozens of crimes for every crime they were arrested for…
A corollary of the criminal power law is that a large fraction of crime can be prevented by addressing a surprisingly small number of persistent offenders…
In 2020, three prolific burglars were on the loose in Leinster, Ireland. Together they had accumulated over 200 convictions. But one day, they all died in a traffic accident. As a result, the robbery rate plummeted.
That would be this incident here. The gentlemen in question met their maker after colliding head-on with a lorry, while driving down the N7, at more than twice the speed limit, in the wrong direction. Their car, a stolen BMW 3 series, promptly burst into flames, making the identification of their remains a time-consuming endeavour.
Happily, the driver of the lorry survived.
Readers with an interest in the subject are advised to read the whole thing, in which eye-widening statistics abound, along with some rather sensible – and therefore terribly unfashionable – policy suggestions.
Update, via the comments:
Regarding the burglars’ demise, what catches the eye are the gushing tributes from friends and relatives, claiming, rather improbably, that the gleefully malevolent creatures were “too good for this stupid shitty world.”
As if the trio – whose activities included habitual burglary on a prodigious scale, and assaulting and mugging elderly couples and bedridden cancer patients – were somehow deserving of public sympathy. Not the numerous victims of their predations, mind, but the predators themselves. It does rather tell us something about the quality of those friends and relatives, their moral orientation.
Again, I miss the concept of shame.
Oh, and consider this an open thread. Share ye links and bicker.
A nuisance to the end.
As so often, what catches the eye are the gushing tributes from friends and relatives, claiming, rather improbably, that the gleefully malevolent creatures were “too good for this stupid shitty world.”
As if the trio – whose activities included habitual burglary on a prodigious scale, and assaulting and mugging elderly couples and bedridden cancer patients – were somehow deserving of public sympathy. Not the victims of their predations, mind, but the predators themselves. It does rather tell us something about the quality of those friends and relatives, their moral orientation.
Again, I miss the concept of shame.
Would it be callous to express hope that they were killed not instantly by the collision but slowly by the fire?
Keep going, you’re almost there…
Criminals exist within a subculture of tolerance, support, and approval. That subculture ought to be the target of official and unofficial intolerance of the most extreme sort.
That subculture consists not only of the criminals’ friends and family, but also of the “progressive minded people” who claim that criminals are “victims of society” who deserve our sympathy and who insist that we must treat them with utmost leniency.
I miss, as well, the concept of outlawry for society’s enemies.
[ Post updated. ]
This comes up frequently and while I’m somewhat inclined to agree with the general sentiment that crime can be dealt with, at least for now, by addressing that 5% or so, it is wishful thinking that the 5% is some sort of upper limit. As if the otherwise law abiding aren’t drawn to criminal behavior when they see the 5% so openly getting away with it. In recent progressive retail experience links, more and more persons of not-color seem to be showing up frequently. 5% is an encouraging number insofar as an indication that the problem is manageable if a society actually wants to address the problem but given how bloody f’n stupid our society is, I am not encouraged that the implied solution is the take-away from this for most people with influence.
Perhaps the single most important factor in the decline of Western civilization is that a large share of the incredibly stupid ideas come from persistently radical academics and their political implementers who are never held accountable for their actions. Unlike these criminal scum, their ridiculous, stupid, frequently proven wrong ideas are much more contagious.
The concept of “open classrooms” that was popular back in the 60’s/70’s comes up often among my friends and my wife, whose college degree was in early childhood education. We had recently been discussing one of the middle schools that was a feeder to my high school. Built in the early 70’s (I think) the roof had collapsed once in ’78, repaired, collapsed again a few years ago and was finally bulldozed and replaced. What an incredibly stupid idea. Let’s put hundreds of 12-14 year old kids all in one huge room, especially one without windows, and then try to teach them stuff. What? That’s not working? OK, we’ll just put up some flimsy partitions. A complete failure of a stupid idea. But no one paid for it. Except the stupid taxpayers. And the kids.
I’m trying to imagine how I’d react if one of my relatives had a, shall we say, extensive history of burglary, along with umpteen other crimes, and they subsequently died, injuring the innocent, while fleeing the police. It’s difficult to picture, as – so far as I’m aware – my sisters-in-law don’t make a habit of breaking into people’s homes or assaulting bedridden cancer patients.
And I think I would know if they did.
[ Makes note to pay more attention to family gossip. ]
That.
I miss the concept of government having a duty to the citizenry.
That they were free to continue their . . . activities . . . speaks to a fundamental dereliction by the constabulary and the courts.
I once again suggest a three-strikes-and-we-put-you-out-to-sea-on-a-fucking-raft policy.
Yes, but it’s not uncalled for.
Make the rafts out of papier-mâché.
And readers are welcome to suggest the particular sea.
Crime: long ago I lived in the South in a college town. Blacks were not yet POC but suffered actual discrimination. I lived in or visited the poor black parts of town often. Crime very very low. Jewish ghettos before WWII in many places (including NYC) were very poor and oppressed but had very low crime. Neither poverty nor discrimination cause crime. It is cultural.
The NYT has a profile of Rauch (sp) the second attempted assassin of Trump. They call him a crusader for social justice and highlight his charity work. Holy shit. The media have also scrubbed his social profiles.
Symbolism.
Or a “spend the rest of their lives in prison, making license plates” policy.
Random thought: How many movies from the 60’s and 70’s can we recall that glorified or at least sympathized with criminals and anti-social types.
I’ll start the list with Bonnie and Clyde and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.
(Why only the 60’s and 70’s? Because that was before the further degradation of gangster rap culture.)
Ryan Routh.
I think it’s time to repeat a comment I posted here some months back:
An “exercise for the reader”: what to do about the 3 percent and the 7 percent.
Similar experience: I was born in the 50’s. My parents didn’t have much money, so we often shopped at stores in the poor black part of town–thrift stores, discount sections of chain department stores, and Goodwill/Salvation Army/St Vincent de Paul. It was perfectly safe to do so. But in the latter half of the 60’s this began to change. It would be unthinkable to go there today, and the stores nearly all gone.
Poking Wikipedia in search of bias.
Woman’s car torched when she refused to pay protection money to park on street.
Remember the old custom of shooting looters and arsonists on sight? Good times.
I know someone who claims to be a Wikipedia editor, and he has lied to my face about basic facts.
Perhaps the entire Wikipedia model is naively utopian.
But then the law-abiding, including victims of serious crime, will be coerced to pay for the food and heating and medical care of incorrigible miscreants, including, conceivably, the creatures who violated them.
Along with any other alleged necessities.
Rafts would be cheaper. And they needn’t be expensive rafts, or structurally sound.
You’re not wrong.
But it’s possible we can find work for them which is highly dangerous. Testing survival gear on Pluto, for instance. 😀
Concrete overshoes are even cheaper.
Shouldn’t you expect riotous behaviour at an event called ‘Riot Fest’?
Some of this really was white privilege. Whites were far more likely to get police protection/government action in those days. Blacks were left to their own, for the most part. Especially for theft, petty or otherwise. The black on black crime is probably the greatest driver of black poverty. The damage it does to trust amongst/between blacks is literally immeasurable.
Heh.™
I certainly expect a certain level of cluelessness from people who are attracted to things with “riot” in the name.
Speaking of both and criminal trajectories. (heed the warning)
Even in 1940, black crime levels were significantly higher than white crime levels. But still not as horrific as they are today. And somehow it was perfectly safe to take the El late at night to jazz clubs in Harlem or Chicago’s South Side. It was also safe to sleep in the park on hot summer nights. Thomas Sowell has written about this, and with vastly more personal experience than I have.
…it was perfectly safe to take the El late at night to jazz clubs in Harlem…
It’s the A train; You must take the A train, to go to Sugar Hill way up in Harlem.
As I type, The Other Half is watching Magnum Force.
Which, for some reason, made me laugh.
In one day.
Speaking of crime: Oy, you got a loicense for that Amazon Prime Video?
Just tried watching A Very Royal Scandal. I lasted 15 minutes. Turns out that even an idealised version of Emily Maitlis, played by an actress, is still insufferable.
In 2023, on average, the U.S. received (?) 8,769 ‘migrants’ per day.
Governments aren’t failing to protect their nations, they’re actively subverting them.
I like that someone in the comments just posts a single photo of the Piranha Brothers. Pretty sure BBC is going to start nailing heads to the floor soon for non-payment.
Was he thinking Baba O’Reilly?
the Piranha Brothers.
@David, who said:
I agree with the observation you’re making here, but… I fear I have to make something of an opposing point, in order to maintain intellectual honesty.
That would be the same point I made to several acquaintances of mine who were members of the Seattle Police Department, men who denied to me that they had a problem with racism and unfair enforcement of the law: If you don’t self-police, someone will eventually do that for you.
The thing that’s struck me, down the years? Every time I’ve been around events, institutions, and people who demonstrated behaviors contrary to “good and decency”, there have been people in the surrounding social matrix who saw nothing wrong with what they were doing, and who would defend them to the death. Even in the face of outrageously compromising evidence.
You almost have to stand in awe of it, when you see it: Dude was on a fire department, and had spent a career of casually looting the scenes of death and fires, to include taking money out of wallets of people on gurneys in accidents. I mean, it was going on right in front of his peers, but because he was able to successfully pull off a portrayal of “hero fireman”, nobody ever questioned what he did. When the whole thing finally caught up with him, and they had video of him doing what he did routinely, everyone denied, denied, denied… Except for the lone rookie who’d “narked” on him, and then wound up blackballed from every department in the state.
This isn’t a phenomenon of social class, ethnicity, or anything else: It’s a pretty common human behavioral trait, an unfortunate one.
It’s also distressing to note that people often refuse to take action against peers, when they observe misconduct. Even the “good guys” look the other way, when they see cops and so forth on their left and right egregiously violating ethical standards, because “cops”. Same with doctors; they see malpractice by other doctors, they refuse to act. “I saw nothing…” They close ranks, defend, and the victims can’t do a damn thing about it.
What you’re seeing here isn’t necessarily down to “the black criminal class defending its own”, but “like defends like”. It takes a truly upstanding and courageous person to do like that rookie fireman did, and turn in his mentor for petty (and, not-so-petty…) theft. Given the price he paid, I suspect that man was more a hero than many an acclaimed one ever could be.
@WTP said:
This is typical of the lackwits working in “education”. You can name innumerable fads running through “education” for these last many decades, and you’ll discover nothing but unpunished failure.
“Whole Language”, anyone? “The New Math”? The latest math BS, whatever the hell it’s called? None of them actually, y’know… Work.
I don’t know what the hell happened that all these lackwits gravitated towards “education”, but the raw fact is that the end-product of their efforts has done nothing but go downhill since they got involved. At some point, the sheer weight of empiric evidence that what they’re doing ain’t working should have had effect. That was fifty-odd years ago, when I was a grade-school student. That this crap is still going on is a testimony to people’s susceptibility to charlatanism and “expert” authority. None of this crap works… All it does is dumb down the kids. My maternal grandmother graduated from a good highschool in Portland, Oregon back around 1916. She went from there to teaching in a one-room school up in the mountains of Eastern Oregon, and her students all managed, somehow, with a highschool diploma teacher at the helm, in attaining full literacy and numeracy. On a very limited budget, I might add; Grandmother had to chop her own firewood with the help of the older students. Today’s teacher, with the fancy facilities and all the lavish funding they get? Often does not produce students able to read or do math at grade level.
Do your own math as to why. I blame the bureaucracy and the infestation of our educational institutions with these lackwit dumbasses that seem to fall for every new fad dreamed up by their lackwit peers.
A friend from my middle school years, who went on to become a firefighter, his son became a cop. He got caught up in a scandal, well stood up to what was going on actually, where his supervisor was somehow getting guys to send him dickpics. Which he then used as kompromat to control them. He blew the story open, though nearly was persecuted himself.
“Blew” is doing a lot of work there.
That’s an excellent example, there. Kudos to that young cop…
At the risk of being repetitive, this sort of thing isn’t confined to any one element of society. Supposed “good guys” do it as often as the bad ones do, and that sad fact is far worse in my mind.
I expect skels to be skels, and do evil unrepentantly. I do not expect, nor will I tolerate, the “good” to do that same thing that they are supposed to be fighting.
What really pisses me off, however, is when I see things like what happened to Derek Chauvin, who basically got screwed over because he did precisely what his department taught him to do. The “great and the good” of the city he served then got in line to pull a train on his ass, and blame him for what happened that day, along with the other cops who were there. And, nobody spoke out… Not the trainers, not the people who wrote the manuals and policies, not any of them. They all folded their hands and piously went along with scapegoating all of the men they’d put in that position in the first place, while also lying their asses off about what actually killed George Floyd.
Our institutions are riddled with moral cowardice, and we reward that fact. Look at what happened in Minneapolis a few years back, surrounding the killing of Justine Damond, where a clearly compromised department put a totally unqualified man in uniform, gave him the literal “badge and a gun” to kill his victim… And, nobody in the “system” was held accountable for having done that.
Lack of accountability is what’s killing everything. If the planaria doesn’t get hit with the shock, it doesn’t move away from the source of the pain… If you want to fix something in a system like ours, there must be a credible and reliable threat of pain and retribution delivered unto the malefactors resident within.
And, that’s assuming that most of the denizens of these vast reef-structures of governance are even as smart as a flatworm… Which, to my mind? Ain’t all that good a bet.
This. And the rest of your comment as well. As much as I dislike denying the leftists agency for what goes on, I really despise those on the right for letting it happen. I was very relieved when my friend’s son was ultimately exonerated. When my friend first told me about what had happened…well I hadn’t seen him in about 40 years but he was one of the most decent people I had known…I was shocked when he told me what his son was going through. As unbelievable as it seemed, it also seemed to fit a pattern that I had seen elsewhere. Nothing anywhere near as bad as that but I was very concerned. More than I let on in talking to him. He’s a pretty upbeat guy and from what I can derive about his son (never met him but I have seen a few videos of him speaking), his son is as well. I cannot imagine how anyone less positive-thinking could have stood up to that. Not only was his department against him, but he had to fight elements of the city old boy (kinda) network as well.
Back in the early 1990s, California residents were finally fed up with rampant crime and a revolving door that let criminals (especially repeat offenders) back out on the streets in very short order – hence they passed a proposition that was 3 strikes and “out”. It was aimed at punishing career criminals — 2 serious felonies and a 3rd offense of misdemeanor or felony and BOOM enhancement that sent one to state prison.
Unexpectedly, crime went down. But soon the usual suspects were complaining that prisons were too crowded and racial disparities “proved” *systemic racism*.
Bovine effing excrement.
I started as a secretary at San Bernardino District Attorney’s office in 1998 … I’d be in county employ until retiring in 2020, moving up the ladder until I supervised 2 offices over a staff of 41 in support of 130 attorneys. I ran thousands of CLETS, handled police reports, posted files, created statistic reports, discovery procedures … etc etc etc and yes … CLETS alone (I’d say 90-95%) of defendants had multiple charges/convictions on their sheets. The “first time offender” with a clean rap did happen, but it was unusual enough to be noticed.
But most normal people outside the justice system are blissfully unaware of the crime that goes on in their neighborhoods/towns/cities until it happens to them. Then they are SHOCKED “Nothing like that happens HERE!”
Oh yes it does, Karen. You’re just too busy virtue signaling about how if criminals were just “given a job/food/housing” crime would disappear.
Pffffft. These people are not like you. Whether it was the culture they were raised in or just born sociopaths, they.are.not.like.you.
And so it goes. The whining leftists against 3 strikes (e.g. Erwin Chemerinsky who has remained Leftwing even as he & his wife were bullied in their own home by jew-hating law students) gained traction in both gelding 3 strikes and wiping out any significant penalty for petty theft.
The CA electorate is poised to finally making a correction by voting to reverse Prop47 but it will probably be too little too late and the Democrats will be sabotaging it at every opportunity.